Pre-Conference-Workshop

Visual communication research increasingly confronts early career scholars with challenging platform environments – from harmful extremist or antifeminist content to sensitive spaces such as war influencers, mental health negotiations, family blogging with minors involved or communities of marginalized groups. Navigating these environments raises ethical, legal and methodological questions that are particularly challenging for early career scholars – including how to care for oneself as a researcher when working reflexively with difficult material and how to ensure ethically careful and responsible research practices towards the communities and individuals under study. This workshop is therefore dedicated to the communal discussion of possibilities and challenges of researching visual platforms and to the practices of self-reflection and care that scholars require. It is intended to give participants the opportunity to get insights into possible approaches and ethical considerations, as well as to present and discuss their own material, questions and problems while handling challenging platform environments in their own research projects – regardless of the status of their work.

Participation is free of charge and open to all interested doctoral students, as well as post-doctoral and master’s students whose projects and interests are situated in the fields of digital media, platform and/or communication research.

In the first part of the workshop, we will welcome invited keynote speakers to share insights on their ethical and methodological best practices in researching challenging platform environments. After a joint break, we will provide participants with the opportunity to exchange their ideas with other (post)doctoral researchers or master’s students in ethics and method circles. The aim is to discuss a variety of approaches in an open-minded setting to enable constructive further work on qualitative methods and ethical approaches and most importantly to build caring early career networks. The focus lies on peer-exchange and joint assistance. At the end, all groups come together to discuss their respective results. It is aimed to consolidate and summarize the results of the discussions after the event, with the potential of crafting a joint working paper.

The workshop is organized as a pre-conference of the conference “25 Jahre Bilder im Fokus. Paradigmen, Praktiken und Perspektiven” of the DGPuK Visual Communication Section taking place from 18 – 20 November 2026 in Klagenfurt.